The End
by Feilyn
Summary: “I suppose this is the part where you tell me the story of how your love turn to hatred and you strove to overtake me,” he states blandly, as she stands behind him, kunai to his throat. These are the tatters of his bonds twisting around his neck. Choking.


In the end, it really is her who knows him best.

"I suppose this is the part where you tell me the story of how your love turn to hatred and you strove to overtake me," he states blandly, blankly, as she stands behind him, kunai pressed to his throat. His body holds a faint of curiosity in the way it shifts to avoid having her slit his throat open, and while once she might have built that small hint up with layers of hope and caring, right now is not 'once'. She strips any remnants ruthlessly away, and doesn't press the kunai closer with a hand shaking in rage. It remains calm, cold, steady. Imbued with him.

"I don't hate you," she replies, keeping an ear out for allies or enemies. Her world does not consist solely of him. She knows from experience that if you try to catch him like that, this boy only slips through your fingers.

She doesn't bother to explain herself. He doesn't care for the answer, unless he does, in which case she's already won. Her free hand twitches on his chest, over his heart.

"You want to save me," and there's that mocking air she remembers. It would almost be nostalgic, if not for the fact that it shows just how much he clearly knows nothing about her. If she was anyone else, he would have killed her by now. But this boy has always frozen time where he wants it to stay, capturing a moment and clinging to it. It might have made her angry, that he wouldn't recognise how she's changed, matured, if she didn't now find it so pathetic.

He does care then, cares that it's her who has him in the end, trapping him with more than just a kunai to the throat.

These are the tatters of his bonds, twisting around his neck and choking.

"What's left to save?" she asks, and while her tone isn't easy, it has a hint of flippancy that can pretend to be. Someone else might have tried to take those tatters in hand, painstakingly repair them, but she is not someone else. It's not that she doesn't want to, just that she's beyond trying. "I don't hate you, and I'm not going to waste my time on someone too far gone to be dragged out – not matter how much you want it."

He starts, and the kunai bites into his neck because she's not so invested in looking cool that she'd bother to stop it.

"You think I want...?" and his voice has fallen back to bland, a protective facade that she doesn't even need a needle to poke holes in.

"I know you want," she sighs. "I know you want someone to come and take your hand and dig you out of this hole you've made for yourself, because I _know_ you. I knew you when you were twelve and leaving, and I knew you when you were sixteen and never coming back. And I know you now that you want to return, and can't, because you're in too deep. I know you won't kill me. And I'm _sick_ of knowing you." Her right hand is rock steady, neither digging deeper nor relenting, but the left hand twitches again. Over his heart. "I'm tired, Sasuke. That's all."

It's his name that breaks it, breaks the literal hold she has over him even as figurative claws dig their way deeper. The kunai is gone from his throat in a split second, and she's strong now, more than strong, but he's overpowered and desperate. Her body slams into a tree trunk, held there by his.

"You're wrong," he tells her, almost conversationally, if he was capable of something so casual. "You're wrong."

There's no vehemence there, no brutal insistence. Just his voice and the hard, harsh pressure of his body against hers.

She looks him in the eye, his stupidly overpowered Sharingan not even registering. All she can see now is the six year old who watched his family die. "If you believed that, I'd be dead already," she says simply.

He stares at her for a moment, and she knows he _wants_ to, can feel the power building in him, reaching boiling point. But she also knows he can't, because Uchiha Sasuke freezes time where he wants it, and he froze her at twelve years old, knocked out on a stone bench with tears drying on her face.

"...What, Sakura?" he asks finally, and her name on his lips, even this close, has no effect. "What do you want out of this? I'm not going to kill you, and you can't kill me."

She blinks, once, and then gives him a pitying look. "You really didn't notice," she murmurs, almost to herself.

There's an almost imperceptible frown then, a mere twitch of the eyebrows that coincides beautifully with the clench of her fist as the chakra strings she tied around his heart from her left hand contract. Her control is perfect, as always, and she is unrelenting.

"A distraction, Sasuke," she tells him as his eyes fly wide open and he chokes, falling away from her. "All I wanted was a distraction."

She didn't get an answer, but that was all right. She hadn't expected one.


End file.
